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Monday, May 12, 2014

A lovely Mother's Day

Lol! A lovely Mother's Day - a video call with my daughter for an hour, and my son kindly raked and cleaned up my patio and then we went to Lizzie Violet's Cabaret Noir - the best!

That's me reading a complexly constructed piece that will become the opening in a voiceover prose poem in a videopoem - I compacted three different pieces of writing (that I dragged out of the tangles in my mind) over months to create an intricate piece that was edited and re-written a few times and yet it was thought to be stream-of-consciousness writing... which struck me as quite funny (it had been a lot of literal fret-work). But, I suppose, the thing is to make the final version look effortless and a bit bumpy, as if it had been dashed off in a moment of inspiration.

Or maybe it was reading from a Moleskine journal - the place where you usually write the first draft as it comes out. I had written all over the place in a number of different apps and programs on my computer and tablet and actually hand wrote the final edited version from all the computer ones!

I need to write a few more pages before it will work with the clip that I have already edited. If the body of the piece takes as long as the beginning did, it could be many months before it's done!
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About Me

BRENDA CLEWS is a poet, painter, dancer, video-maker, mother, friend, muse, mystery-maker, a lover, a solitary, believer in divine sybaritism. 'While we all have an instinctual sense of what 'art' is, it's from a 'Weltanschauung' that is itself art because it is part of the process of conscious life in a world that is a work of art.

Our universe's creativity is beyond our wildest imaginings.'

Brenda was born in Zimbabwe in the then small mining town of Chinhoyi. When she was two her father, D. Richard Clews, who was a geologist, moved her and her mother to Kafue National Park in Zambia, then the largest game park in Africa, as he joined a mining team looking for copper, and where her two brothers were born.

She cites her early years spent in the jungle, barefoot, living in a compound of mud huts, with many wild animals and the wonderful Ndembu people for her deep resonance with the beauty, strangeness and brilliance of the tribal mind and the natural world.

After the time in the jungle came a year in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, and then her father took the family to England where he obtained a doctorate in Geochemistry and accepted a position in Canada. Brenda has lived in Canada since then.

Brenda has a full-length collection of poetry, Tidal Fury, with Guernica Editions, 2016. She has a forthcoming novella, Fugue in Green, with Quattro Books, 2017. LyricalMyrical Press published her chapbook, the luminist poems, in 2013. She hosts Poetry & Music Salons in Toronto.

She has edited university textbooks and creative writing, taught writing, written articles for newspapers, taught Kundalini Yoga, done temporary office work, and dog sitting, while maintaining a reclusive lifestyle of writing and painting. She raised two wonderful children as a single mother. She has a degree in Fine Arts and abandoned a PhD in English Lit many years ago.

Brenda has had solo art shows at York University (2000), Q Space (2013) and Urban Gallery (2014), and been in a number of group art shows including 'Birthtales' (1992) at A Space, 'Birth2' (2004) at Ayer Lofts in the US, '5 By 5' (2013) at The Gladstone Hotel, Yellow House Gallery (2014), SuperWonder Gallery (2016) and Arcadia Gallery (2016). Her artwork has appeared in 'Addiction to Perfection' and as two journal covers and in a poster for ‘ARM Magazine.’

Her poetry has been published in print journals, like 'Tessera,' and 'ARM Journal,' and on-line at sites, including 'Qarrtsiluni,' 'Mothers Movement Online,' and 'The Browsing Corner' (she is not good at submitting her work). She presented papers yearly at conferences at York University and OISE on the maternal body from 2001-2006. Her video poetry has been featured at 'CrossBridge' (an international multidisciplinary journal), and 'Moving Poems ('best poetry videos on the web').

She is a multi-media artist whose approach to a topic may include poetry, painting, theory, dance, recordings, and video. Brenda's oeuvre focuses on the plethora, the multiple callings, the obsessive muse, the prism rather than the spotlight, or on multiple spotlights. She writes, "Where else do you flee? How do you combine yourself?"